When the pandemic arrived, suddenly, we were gazing at a world turned upside down. As G.D. Tripathy writes in the introduction to the book Sociological Reflections on the COVID-19 Pandemic in India (published by Springer), this is how Alice’s world flipped in Through the Looking Glass. This pandemic ruptured the routine, the predictable and the taken-for-granted. How do we make sense of this rupture and its impact on every social institution- family, education, economy? How do we think about this ‘new normal’ that has percolated our everyday vocabulary and everyone is trying to come to terms with? Significantly, how can the sociological lens help us to understand these new shifts? In search of these answers, a common thread connecting all the chapters of this book is that though this pandemic impacted every individual, its effects were unevenly distributed. This was the result of pre-existing vulnerabilities, which the pandemic only visibilised and amplified. Therefore, it allows us to pause and rethink our social structure, relationships, and lives and look for possibilities to shape this new and better ‘normal’.
A site that is routinely associated with a sense of certitude and comfort is the home. In the popular imagination, the home has always been romanticized as a haven instead of the threatening outside. But gradually, counter-intuitive meanings and experiences of the home began to surface. Contrary to popular perceptions, unequal power relations, gendered division of labour, and violence that characterize many homes became apparent. The work-from-home and access to technology blurred the lines of the inside and outside, creating a ‘new normal’. While for some groups and individuals, the transition was smooth due to existing privileges of caste, class and gender, for others, this overlap became challenging. The book primarily focuses on the experiences of the latter. Existing literature has indicated how women in paid employment struggled to work from home with added responsibilities and a lack of support systems.
By ‘gendering the pandemic’, Rashi Bhargava’s chapter focuses on full-time, middle-class homemakers and their changing experience of the home under the lockdown. Her interviewees constantly found themselves sharing this space with other family members, catering to increasing demands, which left no breathing space possible in pre-COVID times. This was an opportunity for other household members to experience and acknowledge the labour-intensive household work women do routinely, which otherwise goes unpaid, undervalued or unrecognized. For these women, the piecemeal sharing of work by others did not bring much relief. Bhargava’s chapter provides fresh insight into the lives of homemakers who earlier had negotiated some control over the home by shaping it as an extension of themselves, increasingly felt it slipping away during the lockdown.
Mala Kapur Shankardass’ chapter approaches COVID as a social disaster rather than a medical one. It increased the risk of loneliness and anxiety among an already vulnerable population, the children, the elderly, and people with disabilities. In addition to the risk of infection, social distancing, travel restrictions, and lockdown increased the vulnerability of the elderly or people with disabilities living on their own, distant from their families, or those who could no longer depend on the support of family members or caregivers. The fear of infection is amplified by the fear of finding oneself alone and uncared for. One crucial point by the author is that the existing or uniform solutions, like treating technology as a panacea for COVID induced challenges, may not fulfil the needs of this population.
This point is highlighted in Aruna Grover’s chapter discussing the impacts of the closure of educational institutions. While it affected every learner, this impact was felt acutely by some more than others. Education like work, social interaction, health consultation moved online, but COVID revealed the deep chasm among social groups in the form of the digital divide. Students from poor and working classes, the historically disadvantaged groups and girls are first-generation learners, and their entry into schools and colleges continues to be fraught with challenges. Sociologists of education have always argued that educational institutions, misperceived as neutral, play a role in reproducing the social structure. Episodes of discrimination in schools and universities along caste, class and gender dispel the myths of equal opportunity. Now, these challenges were compounded by a lack of access to technology when institutions decided to continue education in the online mode without proper training and infrastructure support.
Grover critiques the hasty launch of the National Education Policy (NEP) in 2020 amid this chaos. While the NEP makes lofty claims about integrating teaching-learning with ICT, it has no clear strategy on how this will be done when the ground realities show access to the internet and electronic devices is absent for a large population, bursting claims of digital India. The author urges the government to see this as an opportunity to reconfigure education and make it more equitable with infrastructural support, training programmes, and political will. The ‘new normal’ in the field of education should iron out the existing inequalities. COVID 19 similarly laid bare the reality of our country’s weakening health sector, which is the focus of Anurita Jalan’s chapter. On the one hand, while the state and hospitals struggled to cope, the fear of the unknown and unseen made people suspicious of everyone around them, scrambling for cure and prevention in indigenous systems. On the other hand, communities gripped by fear began to isolate and stigmatize the sick and the marginalized emotionally.
Along similar lines, the book’s last two chapters by Pawan S. Harsana and Sana Khan discuss how the pandemic exacerbated the already historically entrenched socioeconomic inequalities. The exodus of migrant workers in April 2020 following the announcement of a nationwide lockdown will remain etched in our minds. People who relentlessly work in the country’s informal economy in precarious conditions and significantly contribute to our cities’ ecosystem as construction workers, daily wage labourers were suddenly made visible by the crisis, on the roads, desperate to go home. Workers who contribute to roughly half of India’s GDP were hidden in the state’s myopic vision when a 21-day lockdown was imposed with a mere four-hour notice. They continue to languish in poverty and constitute the majority of the population who lost their employment in this period. But even they became conspicuous, the government’s relief measures did not benefit everyone. The civil society had to intervene to provide medical, educational, legal aids, which is the focus of Khan’s chapter. The chapter puts a face to this otherwise faceless group of migrant workers- the painters, gardeners, the rickshaw pullers. Workers from Delhi’s riot[i]-hit areas were recuperating from fear and damage to property when the pandemic worsened their situation. An important point that emerges from the narratives of workers in Khan’s paper is about the dehumanization and loss of dignity felt by these workers when they were receiving aid from the state. This is consistent with the neoliberal logic that stigmatizes welfare recipients, undermines the labour of poor and working classes and blames them for their poverty.
While the book broadly discusses the vulnerabilities of already precarious groups, Pratisha Borborah and Jyoti Das’ chapter focuses on class privileges by surveying how the consumption habits of the middle-and upper-class consumers changed as they spent more time on social networking and online streaming sites, which, as the title suggests, brought ‘the world inside the home’. The increase in social media usage was also an opportunity for businesses to capitalize on and stay afloat by refashioning their products. One limitation, however, is that a profile of the sample they call the new middle class is missing in the methodology section. In understanding the change in their routines and consumption habits, adding narratives to the quantitative figures would have added more depth to how they perceive this new normal.
Overall, the book is an important contribution to the sociological literature on the pandemic. While the points raised have appeared in articles and blogs, a lucidly written, comprehensive volume that draws explanations from sociological theories to understand this crisis will be valuable for students of sociology.
[i] https://thewire.in/communalism/delhi-riots-jai-shri-ram-hindutva-bjp, accessed on 24th November 2021.
***
Sriti Ganguly is an Assistant Professor at the School of Liberal Arts and Humanities, O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana.